


Writerly Gaze

by innie



Category: Wonder Boys (2000), Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon
Genre: First Time, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Virginity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-24
Updated: 2010-07-24
Packaged: 2017-10-10 18:47:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/102958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spinning words out of sex.</p><p>(prompt words: literate, wonder, tongue, pillow, sobriety)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Writerly Gaze

He can hear James's breath, hitching a little in anticipation, nearly whistling in his lungs from nerves and sparks of lust, and he pauses in his methodical unbuttoning of James's wondrously ugly shirt - only someone so lovely could get away with wearing a visual assault like that - to look up and steady him with his gaze.

James has lustrous, liquid eyes, always wide; the sheer panic swimming in them eases Terry's conscience as he recognizes that James, while perhaps not quite up to narrating, is, at the very least, up for cataloging, for spinning these straws, events that have spun out of his control, into the gold of his words. It's that writerly gaze, looking both inward and outward, that had hooked Terry first, though he'd defiantly claim that it was that ruby-colored mouth, incarnadine softness, or maybe the slim-hipped litheness of the boy that caught his attention.

James was panting, the quick flutters of his pale chest made visible by Terry opening his unbuttoned shirt like the velvet drapes of a theater parting. But it was the boy's hand, not his heart, that had _Frank Capra_ carved into it; his heart was not the water where Terry longed to write his name, but the scarred and heavily edited palimpsest James was offering up with the way he willed himself to get back in control.

James's shaky hand reached out, surprising Terry with a thumb heavy against his lower lip, a sweet, tentative drag of flesh that made his tongue reflexively dart out like something newly wakened. He let James's hand slip to his cheek, the salt of the boy's thumb still stinging his tongue, and raise his face for that first tentative kiss.

He tasted so _young_, so untried, and the movements of his lips were merely Terry's in reverse - Terry thought immediately of Ginger Rogers, dancing backward in her high heels - studied in the most artless way. James's skin was so soft that even Tripp's battered lamp made it pearly, and when they finally pulled apart, James's eyes were heavy-lidded like he'd been drugged, and Terry awoke to the wonder of this boy, who he'd come to completely sober, wanting to pull him into that dry and magical land, no defenses but each other, every sense only as sharp as it needed to be to navigate back to the heights of work worth doing.

Terry kissed him again, pushed him back on the bed, watching the surrender of James's dark head rumple as it hit the pillow, turned him over and watched his hair spill like liquid against the white sheets. His smooth young back was dotted with moles, his knees almost too knobby to believe, but Terry nudged them apart, words spinning through his mind - _asymmetrical, flushed, ponderous, pain, mine_ \- and James dazedly complied, lost again as he fumbled for words of his own.

This was what he wanted, not just this spotless young body, but James coming to him willingly, wanting to make their bed a stew of sex and allusions and endless strings of words.

But it would have to be up to James, in the morning. All Terry really had was this night.


End file.
